


Error

by Laetitia_Laetitii



Category: Runescape
Genre: Alternative Timeline, Gen, Making History, Meeting History, World Guardian - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 16:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6477127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laetitia_Laetitii/pseuds/Laetitia_Laetitii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was always bothered by the idea of just how many things could have gone wrong with the player's time travel trip in Meeting History. This is one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Error

                I turned around to wave one more time at Roger and Laura, and then the key was hot in my hands and I was falling through the night beyond time. I was counting backwards in my mind, bracing to land in a field by the River Dougne, when suddenly a jolt of pain shot through me. For a second I hung suspended in the emptiness, and then a bright, fiery light exploded and burned everything away.

            When I came back to my senses, I was still floating. In front of me, perceivable through the afterimages dancing in my eyes, was someone. I knew instinctively it was a person, or at least a sentient being, though what gave me this impression I could not say. It was a swirling cloud of some silvery substance, half-liquid, half-gas, but the longer I stared at it the more resolutely my brain insisted that I was looking at a small, gray-haired, rather timid-looking man holding a clipboard and a quill. At length, he looked up, and greeted me.

            “This is terribly irregular, Mistress Westbrook,” he said, “I’m afraid it’s going to be quite a hassle to sort out.”

            “What happened,” I whispered. My throat felt oddly sore, as if I had screamed for hours. “And who are you?”

            “I hardly have a need for a name,” the little man said, peering at me over his wire-rimmed glasses. “But let us say it is my job to see things run smoothly.”

            “What things,” I croaked, although I had a suspicion.

            “All Things,” he said. By now he was definitely a man, and only a pale glow around him suggested otherwise. “What has happened here, Aileen, is a nasty case of contamination. When you entered the past, you brought with yourself a wealth of pathogens that _you_ are resistant to, but which were entirely new to First-Age immune systems. To make a long story short, one of them, the bird-borne _Yersinia Abbinahica,_ wiped off the entire human, gnome, dwarf and elf populations in less than fifty years, and as a result history went rather differently after that. Especially after Guthix left, the poor fellow. I’ll not bore you with the details, but when Zaros finally ended up on Gielinor, he had no concerns about conquest, and was at perfect liberty to poke about. He was reunited with his sister, and together they went looking for their relatives. I don’t have the time to explain what the pair of them did, but it all ended with _them_ waking up prematurely and well, you can guess the rest. However, the rewrite was too large for the system to handle all at once and I’m afraid the time-space processing unit is fried.”

            “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say. At least it was true.

            “No need to be,” he said. “It never ceases to amaze me either just how delicate these things are.”

            “What now?” I asked.

            “Now everything starts again,” the man said, and ticked something on his clipboard. “And I fear I must be going, as there are quite a lot of repairs to do. He took a neatly folded handkerchief from the pocket of his vest and wiped down his glasses. Satisfied with the result, he replaced them and looked at me. “My work used to be so simple,” he said, his tone not unkind. “And then the damned Elder Gods came to being and ever since it’s all been a nightmare. But I just don’t have the heart to get rid of them…”

            And then I was falling again, and when I landed, it was not on Gielinor or anyplace else I could recognize. Nevertheless, I understood that the stone desert under the night sky was older than anywhere I had ever been. As I watched, stars emerged and died out above me, each burning bright for a few seconds against the primordial darkness. I had seen something like that a long time ago, in a petri dish under Cromperty’s brass microscope. It was beautiful, the same way the plague bacteria had been.

            I could feel the air getting colder, and somehow I knew it meant things were coming to an end. Over the expanse of the sky more and more stars were coming out, and as the first shakes rocked the ground, I looked up to see a pattern emerge in them. It was writing; writing in the language of things older than the Void. The last message I or anyone I knew of would ever see flashed in the heavens, and I had just enough time to read the words: _“Your Universe ran into a problem and needs to restart.”_ And then it was all over.


End file.
